Heptathlete Saga Vanninen will train in the future under the coaching of Estonian decathlon Olympic and EC winner Erki Nooli, the Finnish Sports Federation confirms.
Four-time winner of the junior championships, 7-player Saga Vannisen the coaching situation changed after the finished season, when the athlete and the coach Jesse Jokinen said that the cooperation that started in 2022 had ended.
Estonian athletics legend Erki Nool54, previously admitted to Urheilu that he was negotiating Vanninen’s coaching contract.
Nool won the 10-match Olympic gold in Sydney 2000 and achieved three other prestigious medals.
Vanninen was recently in Tallinn for a week, where he trained under Nooli and was satisfied with his experience.
– It seemed really good. Erki sees mistakes and things to be corrected very quickly. As a coach, he is fun, but very demanding. I think it’s good that the coach can be demanding, but training is still fun, Vanninen says in the press release.
The coaching cooperation is structured so that Vanninen trains mainly in Tallinn, but also in Tampere.
– The intention is that I train quite a lot in Tallinn and lighter periods in Tampere. It will then take shape more precisely when we get to do more together, Vanninen estimates.
According to Vanninen, the fast connections between Tampere and Tallinn influenced the choice, although there were other options.
– I also had a really good and confident feeling about Erki. He has an athletic background. It felt like he immediately knows what’s going on in my head when I’m working out. Erki is in good shape himself and did a lot of training with me, so at least you can’t fall behind him.
Nool, 54, coaches some of the young people in Tallinn who train at the sports school named after him. Nool is also a Japanese decathlete with 8,021 points Yuma Maruyama in coaching.
Nool sees that the goals of the cooperation must be built with a view longer than one season.
– Saga is a talented young athlete. In my opinion, with him, you have to look at what level he needs to be in order for him to be successful in the Olympics four years from now.
Nool describes Vannis as a powerful and explosive athlete and sees. At the beginning of the collaboration, the central goal of training is to increase general fitness and specifically running fitness, and to build the fitness of the body’s small supporting muscles to a new level in order to avoid injuries.
– Especially the supporting musculature is quite weak for me. Partly because of that, there were challenges with my back last summer, Vanninen admits.